Advice & Insights

If you look at our top blog posts of 2018, you’ll see how hiring the right healthcare talent is key to successful workforce management. Selecting and hiring the right people improves your organization’s workplace culture, employee engagement, and retention rates. Your people provide the base for being able to grow your workforce into the future and provide the quality of care your patients and residents deserve.

Here, we count down our top posts of the year to give you the advice and resources you need to start to 2019 off right:

When healthcare administrators ask themselves what they can do to improve patient care and outcomes, they often fall back on investing in cutting-edge equipment, new medicines, and innovative treatments. And, while it’s true that these elements all factor into the quality of care a patient receives, the arguably most important piece of the puzzle is missing: performance management. Your talent is your healthcare organization’s single most important asset. If your people succeed, the organization succeeds, and when the organization succeeds it’s because patients are receiving greater quality care and outcomes. However, if you’re not actively managing your workforce’s performance, you risk fostering an atmosphere of disengagement where patient needs get overlooked. Read more

My grandparents lived and worked in a different world than we do today. And, as professionals in our early and mid-30s, my millennial friends and I cannot even fathom what the workplace and the employer-employee relationship used to look like — before smartphones and leggings, and when “because I said so” was an acceptable answer to an employee’s question. Things in our world, both personally and professionally, have changed drastically in the last 20 years, and today the employer-employee relationship is very different than it used to be. By 2020, millennials will outnumber baby boomers and Gen X combined in the workplace, potentially creating more pushback by the younger cohort. And, with so many organizations and industries hiring today, healthcare included, new hires have much more power than employers may like. Read more

During a recent commute, I caught an episode of WGBH’s and PRI’s “Innovation Hub” that focuses on the way small, seemingly innocuous problems often snowball into massive disasters. As an author and researcher Chris Clearfield points out in the interview, this snowball effect is precisely what disasters like Three Mile Island, Deep Water Horizon, and the 2008 Financial Crisis all have in common. In the segment, Clearfield tells the story of a nurse who, while making her rounds, notices that the hospital has put two patients with similar sounding names in the same room. Not only do these patients’ names sound similar, but so do their medications. Clearly, anyone who has worked in, or around, healthcare knows where this is going. Read more

As the nursing shortage continues to grow, healthcare talent managers need to focus on employee engagement and employee satisfaction if they wish to both recruit and retain nurse leaders today, as well as inspire the next generation for tomorrow. The starkest reminder of this comes from a December 2017 Advisory Board study that surveyed more than 10,500 nurses — including nursing leadership and management — to determine if they were happy at work. According to the research, while up to 98 percent of respondents say they’re happy they became nurses, only about 20 percent said they’d do it again if they had the chance. Read more

Nurses are the backbone of hospitals, doctors’ offices, and other medical facilities. They are trusted caregivers who offer reassurance, administer medication, and handle all manner of care with kindness and a level head. Nurse leaders do the same and more, and retaining nurse leaders is key for healthcare organizations. When hiring nurse leaders for retention, you need to look for the additional traits that help them excel — and many of these characteristics have little to do with nursing itself. Read more

Healthcare regulatory compliance is a difficult and frustrating space to manage. According to the American Hospital Association report “Regulatory Overload: Assessing the Regulatory Burden on Health Systems, Hospitals, and Post-Acute Care Providers,” hospitals and hospital systems must meet 341 healthcare compliance requirements as of March 2017. The number of healthcare regulations balloons to 629 if a hospital also has beds focused on post-acute care — that’s an additional 288 compliance requirements. While federal agencies have put these regulations in place to ensure the safety and well-being of patients and providers alike, they also have a very real cost for healthcare providers. Read more

With more jobs to fill than ever before, a widening skills gap, and an unprecedented staffing shortage, healthcare talent management professionals are facing an uphill battle where talent markets are tightening and their work is under increased scrutiny. Many talent management leaders are closely tracking key metrics, such as premium labor cost, as a means of understanding the business effects of their talent management practices. Premium labor cost, in turn, is driven almost exclusively by an organization’s vacancy rate and its overall cost-of-vacancy. Therefore, to fully understand the business impact of its talent management practices, a healthcare organization absolutely must understand its cost-of-vacancy. Read more

You already know how difficult the current healthcare recruiting climate is. Between a growing skills gap and historically low unemployment, hospitals, senior living facilities, and other organizations are having trouble hiring efficiently. And this problem is particularly painful if you’re focused on hiring nurses. With an expected nursing shortage of about 1.2 million by 2022, we wanted to better understand what healthcare organizations are doing to hire, keep, and grow nursing talent. Last Nurses Week, we launched a “Nurse Culture Quiz” to look at nursing culture and determine whether healthcare organizations are creating work environments that attract or repel nursing talent. With more than 100 respondents, we dug into the data to give you a glimpse at how healthcare organizations are doing at building a culture that fuels best-in-class nurse hiring. Read more

Employee retention is a challenge in healthcare. According to the Advisory Board, healthcare organizations have a 30.3 percent first-year turnover rate, and the American Health Care Association reports the median turnover rate for direct care staff in skilled nursing care centers is 43.9 percent. In order to reverse these trends, provide better care, and drive patient satisfaction, leading healthcare organizations today are turning their focus toward employee engagement. As many talent management professionals are aware, healthcare organizations are facing a difficult reality navigating increasingly competitive talent markets and growing challenges in patient care. Between constant public feedback and extensive online resources, patients today have more information about the care they receive and feel more empowered to use that information than ever before. Read more

While the skilled labor shortage is a challenge for talent acquisition professionals everywhere, healthcare recruiters are really facing a tough situation: The aging population is putting an increased demand on home healthcare, skilled nursing facilities, and hospitals, and their experienced workers are retiring in droves. The demand for qualified healthcare professionals exceeds the supply, causing 33 percent of hospitals to have a vacancy rate greater than 10 percent, according to Nursing Solutions Inc. As the healthcare talent gap continues to widen, it’s apparent that traditional recruitment strategies are no longer enough. Try some of these emerging healthcare recruitment trends to build a quality workforce for your organization in 2018. Read more

About Norma Gaffin

Norma Gaffin was the Senior Content Marketing Manager at HealthcareSource. In her role, Norma oversaw the creation and distribution of pieces to help healthcare talent management professionals recruit, retain, and grow their workforces.